Recent advances in the field of contaminant hydrogeology have shown that smoldering combustion can be used to treat soils contaminated with organic wastes. This approach is commercially available as the Self-sustaining Treatment for Active Remediation (STAR) technology and is the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 8,132,987. Smoldering combustion requires a short duration energy input, and the addition of an oxidant (e.g., oxygen, air, etc.) to initiate and sustain the smoldering combustion reaction. An example of a smoldering combustion reaction is that of a burning charcoal briquette. Smoldering combustion is only possible in the presence of a fuel source and a porous matrix. For the case of a charcoal briquette, the charcoal is both the fuel and the porous matrix; whereas for the STAR process, the fuel is the organic contaminant and the porous matrix is the subterranean volume of soil.
There are numerous methodologies for the remediation of contaminated soils, including a group of technologies that use thermal processes to remove or destroy contaminants through endothermic processes (net energy consuming) such as pyrolysis and volatilization. These thermal remedies are often prohibitively costly due to the requirement that large amounts of heat/energy need to be applied to the soils. The STAR technology benefits from the fact that smoldering combustion is an exothermic reaction (net energy producing) converting carbon compounds and an oxidant to carbon dioxide, water and energy. Smoldering combustion reactions can be established with only a short duration, low-input of localized energy and operated in a self-sustaining manner; in essence, the energy for the destruction of contaminants in STAR primarily comes from the inherent energy within the contaminants themselves.